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spk06: Thank you. Thank you. THE END Thank you for watching.
spk03: I will be your conference facilitator today. At this time, I would like to welcome everyone to the Crawford & Company Fourth Quarter and Full Year 2021 Earnings Release Conference Call. In conjunction with this call, a supplementary financial presentation is available on our website at www.crawlcode.com. Under the Investor Relations section, all lines and any background noise. After the speaker's remarks, there will be a question and answer follow at that time. Should anyone need assistance at any time during this conference, please press star then zero and an operator will assist you. As a reminder, ladies and gentlemen, this conference is being recorded today, Tuesday, March 15, 2022. Some of the matters to be discussed in this conference or presentation may include that involve risks and statements may relate to, among other things, the impact of our expected future operation, our ability to grow our revenues and reduce our operating expenses,
spk05: expectations regarding our collectability of our field financial results from our recently completed acquisitions, I continue to compliance with the financial and source
spk03: and liquidity requirements and our ability to pay dividends.
spk05: The company's actual results achieved in future quarters could differ materially from results that may be implied by such forward-looking statements.
spk03: The company undertakes no obligation to publicly release revisions to any forward-looking statements made in this conference call.
spk05: In addition, you are reminded that historical periods are not necessary to be expected for any future period.
spk03: For a complete discussion regarding factors which could affect the company's financial performance, please refer to the company's Form 10-K for the year ended December 31, 2021. File with the Securities and Exchange Commission, particularly the information under the headings Risk Factors and Management Discussions and Analysis of Financial Condition and Results of Operations. This presentation also includes certain non-GAAP financial measures as defined under SEC rules as required. A reconciliation is provided for those measures to the most directly comparable GAAP measures. I would now like to introduce Mr. Rohit Verma, Chief Executive Officer of Crawford and Company, Rohit Dubuque.
spk05: Joining me today is Chief Executive Officer Joseph Blanco, our President, and Tammy Stevenson, our General Counsel.
spk02: After our prepared remarks, we will open the call for your questions. Before I review our results, I would like to extend my thoughts to our colleagues, clients, and partners who have family and friends in and around Ukraine. As you all may know, we do not have any assets on the ground in Ukraine or Russia, but we hope for the safety of the Ukrainian people, especially all those who are directly in harm's way, and for a swift and peaceful resolution. We will continue to monitor this evolving situation to understand how this might affect our colleagues in Ukraine, as well as... Adjusting for the... We reported our highest...
spk05: I am incredibly proud of the team's hard work and dedication in what has been a challenging environment.
spk02: Our impressive top-line growth underscores the strength of our technology and people-focused growth strategy, which is driving results across the company. Full-year revenue was $1.1 billion, representing a 12% increase over 2020. In particular, we saw strong performance from our U.S. operations, where we continued to gain market share across all segments to scale our offerings resulted in revenue growth from both established relationships and new clients. We continued to deploy a record number of CAP resources in 2021 and responded to the increasing demand for major and complex specialist adjusters. Despite a continued lag in medical management revenue recovery, our broad-spire business grew as claim volumes continued to climb with recovering economic activity as well as new account wins. While the U.S. experienced tremendous growth, we had challenges in our international market that diluted margins below our desired levels. This weakness was driven by the same factors that we reviewed with you in our Q3 earnings call. Bruce will go into segment level detail, but this can be largely attributed to three main factors. Now, in weather activity and weakness in some international operations. On a non-GAAP basis, full year EPS was 72 cents for both CRDA and CRDB for 2021. We continue to execute our M&A strategy during 2021, which included the completion of three acquisitions. Praxis, eJuster, and Boss Boone. As a reminder, our M&A strategy is centered around evaluating opportunities to acquire expertise and adjacent capabilities. The independent loss adjusting market continues to consolidate while the PNC industry is increasingly embracing digitally enabled solutions that increase efficiency and help reduce allocated loss adjusting expense. We will selectively invest in P&C markets with secular tailwinds where we see value in further building upon our ecosystem of claims. Additionally, we are actively reinvesting in our core business, while at the same time maintaining our strong balance sheet, which is reinforced by our solid cash generations. Our long-term growth strategy is based on the bedrock of organic growth augmented by selective M&A and continues to be driven by a relentless pursuit for service excellence that stems from our legacy, our purpose, and our values.
spk05: As a reminder, our strategic approach was built around three pillars of differentiation.
spk02: quality that sets the industry benchmark, expertise that is deep and eminent, and digital that simplifies. Overall, we're making good progress and are pleased that our results are showing up in the ways we have expected over the past several quarters. Platforms continues to be the growth engine for Crawford, significantly growing revenues year over year, driving strong margins. The investments we are making to add strength to our bench of experts in loss adjusting continues to enable Crawford to address the increasingly complex nature of claims. Business is beginning to bear fruit.
spk05: We are seeing an early step in the diversification of our European business through the acquisition of Boss Boone.
spk02: We're also starting to see the benefits of our other recent acquisitions, which Joseph will talk more about in a few minutes. Looking ahead, we expect to maintain momentum in the U.S. and start to see growth across our major international geographies, like the U.K. and Australia. We believe Europe, Canada, and Latin America have bright prospects in the long term, but will have a slow path to recovery as business activity ramps up. The impact of COVID and international weakness in certain aspects of the business may continue. However, our continuing prudent expense management. We finished the year in a strong financial position with the liquidity necessary to respond and adapt to continue challenges presented by the ever changing economic environment, as well as evolving client demand. Our capital allocation priorities remain first and foremost to invest in the long-term growth and health of our company, particularly in organic growth and M&A, followed by share buybacks and consistent dividends. Our strong cash flow, favorable debt profile, and nearly fully funded pension liability gave us the confidence to pay a dividend last week of $0.06 per share for both CRDA and CRDB. This is the 45th quarter of continuous dividend payments. Additionally, on February 10th, Crawford's Board of Directors authorized the addition of 5 million shares of CRDA and CRDB to its 2021 repurchase authorization, which has approximately 413,000 shares remaining at year-end. Under the repurchase program, repurchases may be made through December 31, 2023, further demonstrating our confidence in our strategy and belief that our shares trade well below their intrinsic value. With that, I'd like to hand the call over to Joseph, who will walk through more details on our recent operational reorientation and discuss the progress we're making in our individual businesses. Joseph?
spk01: Thanks, Rod. Before we turn to our business on results, as promised, we are continuing to streamline our business for efficiency and effectiveness. As a result, we realigned our management responsibilities to create better scale and synergies and have moved to a geographic reporting structure effective January the 1st, 2022. Moving forward, our reportable segments are comprised of North America loss adjusting, international operations, Broad Spire, and platform solutions. North America Law Suggesting, which services the North American property and casualty market, is comprised of the previously reported Crawford Law Suggesting segment in the U.S. and Canada, including Global Technical Services and eGesture. The Canadian operations will include all operations within that country, including those previously reported within the Crawford TPA Solutions and Crawford Platform Solutions segments. International operations, which services the global property and casualty market outside of North America is comprised of the previously reported Crawford loss adjusting segment outside of North America and includes Crawford Legal Services, which was previously within the Crawford TPA solution segment. Similar to Canada, the individual countries and international operations will include those service lines previously reported within the Crawford TPA and platform solution segments. BroadSpire provides third-party administration for workers' compensation, auto and liability, disability absence management, medical management, and accident and health to corporations, brokers, and insurers in the U.S. Platform solutions consist of contractor connection, networks, and subrogation service lines in the U.S. The network service line includes catastrophe operations and WeGoLook. We believe that this new geographic center reporting structure will not only create greater synergies, but also give greater impetus for our sales and client engagement, as well as provide greater cross-selling capabilities. Turning now to our business line results for the year, which we are reporting under our structure from 2021. In loss adjusting, we continue to gain traction with the large U.S. carriers and small to midsize carriers. For the full year, we saw revenue growth of nearly 9% compared to the prior year period. This was aided by recovering economic activity in the U.S. and the impact from Hurricane Ida. Our strategy on the volume side of the business is to differentiate ourselves by enhancing the efficiency of low-complexity, high-frequency claims processing using digital simplification and quality control. We are seeing positive momentum in those areas as we continue to actively invest in the quality and digital aspects of our claims processing capabilities, underscored by our recent acquisition of eGesture. To become the market leader on the major and complex side, our strategy continues to focus on building our bench of experts to meet rapidly increasing demand for specialist adjusters as claims become more complex. In line with this focus, we onboarded 86 specialist adjusters in the past 12 months, and we continued track to our three-year goal of adding 200 specialist adjusters to our bench. Looking forward, we are focused on continuing to capitalize on recovering economic activity and increased demand for specialist adjusters to drive growth and major in complex claims. Turning to platform solutions, we saw a record year of growth in our network's business as our focused efforts to scale our offerings continued to yield positive results. For the full year, the segment achieved tremendous revenue growth of 32% with improving flow-through as the volume of transactions continued to increase over the course of the year. Additionally, we have seen positive contributions from our recent acquisition of Praxis, which is driving margin expansion in the platform's business. Moving to TPA, The business in the U.S. has continued to expand in both revenue and profit compared to last year, despite a lag in medical management revenue recovery. Revenues were up over 7% for the full year compared to the prior year. Although the revenue we are seeing is profitable, it is offset by a handful of weak spots, especially internationally. Volumes were down in Canada, but this was partially offset by the Q support we were receiving in 2021, which was less favorable compared to what we received in Q support during the prior year. In Europe, our TPA book of business is largely weighted towards travel entertainment, which has seen a disproportionate decline in profitability as a result of the delayed COVID recovery during the second half of 2021. And in Asia, We are resetting our approach to better exploit the opportunities of the region and are actively making more hires and increasing our competitiveness. We are evolving our approach in these geographies and we expect to see a positive impact in 2022. In short, we feel good about all the segments despite some pockets of transitory weakness. We will continue to take a fresh look at challenge businesses to ensure we are operating at optimized level to realize the benefits of top-line growth in both the near term and the long term. Overall, we remain confident about the long-term health of the business and expect organic growth momentum to continue. We won over $28 million in new and enhanced business in the fourth quarter, taking the tally of new and enhanced business won in 2021 to $103 million. We increased our NPF score up to 51, up six points compared to 2020, and up three points from the third quarter of 2021. Additionally, we retained 94% of our U.S. BroadSpire business in 2021, and we are increasing market share with key carrier clients. We will continue our commitment to delivering service excellence as we move through 2022. We are committed to continuously developing and designing our culture as a key differentiator for organizational success. During 2021, we made consistent progress on our DEI initiatives. We introduced new questions on our poll survey to measure employee sentiment regarding our DEI initiatives. Additionally, our employee resource groups, or ERGs, continue to engage employee segments such as multiracial and ethnic employees, women, and LGBTQ plus employees. to ensure that leaders model fairness and inclusivity in their behaviors unconscious bias training was completed by the executive team members and mandated for all of our 1340 managers globally we continue to work for opportunities across our enterprise to become more socially responsible and are increasingly integrating esg best practices into our operations overall we remain steadfast in our commitment to diversity equity and inclusion And we are committed to cultivating a safe, inclusive environment in which everyone's unique perspectives and experiences are heard and valued. As a key component to our success, we are devoted to protecting the safety and well-being of all of our employees. And as a result, we've been able to see a high level of performance and engagement despite the continued challenges presented by COVID. With that, let me turn the call over to Bruce for a deeper look at our financial performance.
spk00: Thank you, Joseph. Company-wide revenues before reimbursements in the 2021 fourth quarter were $292.9 million, up 14% from $257.4 million in the prior year fourth quarter. Foreign exchange rate benefits increased revenues before reimbursements by $3 million. On a constant dollar basis, revenues before reimbursements totaled $289.9 million. GAAP diluted EPS in the 2021 fourth quarter was $0.03 for both CRDA and CRDB compared to EPS of $0.18 for both CRDA and CRDB in the 2020 period. On a non-GAAP basis, fourth quarter 2021 diluted EPS was $0.07 for both CRDA and CRDB compared with $0.27 for both share classes in the 2020 period. The company's non-GAAP operating earnings totaled $9.1 million in the 2021 fourth quarter, or 3.1 percent of revenues, decreasing from $18.5 million, or 7.2 percent of revenues in the prior year period. Consolidated adjusted EBITDA was $17.6 million in the 2021 fourth quarter, or 6 percent of revenues, compared to $27.5 million, or 10.7 percent of revenues in the 2020 quarter. I'll now review the fourth quarter 2021 performance of each of our segments. Crawford loss adjusting revenues totaled $123.1 million in the 2021 fourth quarter, increasing 10.5% from $111.4 million reported in last year's quarter. Foreign exchange rate benefits totaled $2.1 million in the 2021 quarter. The segment reported operating earnings of $4.9 million in the 2021 fourth quarter, decreasing from $16.3 million reported in last year's quarter. The operating margin was 4% in the 2021 quarter, compared to 14.6% in the 2020 quarter. Operating earnings and margin weakness during the quarter were pressured by lower Q's benefits, higher centralized support costs, and weakness in certain international business lines in the UK, Canada, and Asia. Revenues for Crawford Platform Solutions were $70.6 million in the 2021 fourth quarter, increasing 40.7% over the $50.2 million in the prior year quarter. Foreign exchange rate benefits were immaterial in the quarter. Operating earnings in Crawford Platform Solutions totaled $10.4 million, or 14% of revenues, in the 2021 fourth quarter, increasing over operating earnings of $6.7 million, or 13.4% of revenues, in the prior year quarter. expanding margins in our network service line, and the positive contribution from the recent practices acquisition drove the profit improvements. Crawford TPA solutions revenues were $99.1 million in the 2021 fourth quarter, increasing 3.4% from $95.8 million in the 2020 period. Foreign exchange rate benefits were immaterial in the quarter. Crawford TPA Solutions operating earnings were $3.1 million in the 2021 fourth quarter, decreasing from last year's fourth quarter operating earnings of $6.8 million. The operating margin in this segment was 3.1% in the 2021 quarter and 7.1% in the 2020 period. We saw a decrease in the U.S. as a result of a change in revenue mix, as well as weakness in Europe and Canada. Unallocated corporate costs were $9.3 million in the 2021 fourth quarter compared to cost of $11.2 million in the same period of 2020. This decrease was primarily due to lower self-insured expenses, pension expense, incentive compensation, and other unallocated costs partially offset by a reduction in the unallocated portion of the Q's benefit compared to 2020. During the 2021 fourth quarter, The company recognized no benefits from Qs as compared to an overall benefit of $4.8 million in the 2020 fourth quarter. As previously communicated, the company does not expect to recognize any further benefits from Qs. For the full year, the company repurchased approximately 531,000 shares of CRDA and 1.7 million shares of CRDB at an average cost per share of $9.63 and $8.26, respectively. The total cost of share repurchases during 2021 was $19.1 million. Lastly, in connection with the realignment of operating segment manager responsibilities on January 1, 2022, Crawford updated its operating segments by moving to a geographic reporting structure consisting of North America loss-adjusting international operations, broadspire, and platform solutions. The succeeding interim and annual periods will disclose the reportable segments under the new basis, with prior periods restated to reflect the change. We intend to issue an 8 in the coming weeks, restating our segment results for 2021, 2020, and 2019, including all quarters. The company's cash and cash equivalent position as of December 31, 2021, totaled $53.2 million, compared to $44.7 million as of December 31, 2020. Our total receivables were up $26.6 million from December 31, 2020, largely driven by our international operations and accounts receivable from our recently completed acquisitions. Goodwill and intangible assets increased by $76.4 million from 2021 as a result of the recent Ejuster, Praxis, and Boss Boone acquisitions. We made $9 million in discretionary contributions to our U.S. defined benefit pension plan for 2021, in line with contributions that we made during 2020. Although the company has made these contributions for the last several years, given the significant improvement in funding levels, we do not intend to make contributions during 2022. The company's total debt outstanding as of December 31, 2021, totaled $175 million, compared with $113.6 million as of December 31, 2020, reflecting borrowings for recent acquisitions and share repurchases. Net debt stood at $121.8 million as of December 31, 2021, while our leverage ratio under our credit agreement closed at 1.66 times EBITDA. Additionally, our pension liability was down to $17.9 million at the end of 2021, and our U.S. pension funding level improved materially during 2021 to 96%. We are very pleased with this progress. Cash provided by operations totaled $54.3 million during 2021, decreasing $38.9 million compared to 2020. The decrease in cash provided by operating activities was primarily due to a $16.8 billion increase in the change in billed and unbilled accounts receivable, a $19.5 million increase in payroll tax payments deferred in 2020 under the CARES Act, and an increase in income tax payments. As Roeth mentioned earlier, we ended the year with better-than-expected cash flow driven by favorable collection activity, primarily in the U.S., where collections of Hurricane Ida receivables were strong in the fourth quarter. We generated $23.4 million of free cash flow in 2021, compared with $55.8 million in the prior year. With that, I would like to turn the call back to Roeth for concluding remarks. Thank you, Bruce.
spk02: Overall, we are pleased where we ended 2021, especially given the uncertainty that plagued the year. We entered 2022 in high spirits, and we will continue to work on our strategy and refine it to represent the new geography-based operating model that has been implemented for 2022. We will also continue the cultural evolution throughout the organization, which we believe is the underpinning of our strategy, execution, and profitable growth. As we look ahead, we remain keenly focused on our pursuit of restoring lives, businesses, and communities. We are confident in our growth trajectory and are committed to delivering further value to our shareholders. Thank you for your time today. Operator, please open the call for questions.
spk03: At this time, if you would like to ask a question, please press star, then the number one on your telephone keypad. To withdraw your question, press the pound key. If you are using a speakerphone, please pick up your handset before asking your question. We'll pause for just a moment to compile the Q&A roster. Your first question comes from the line of Kevin Steinenke with Barrington Research.
spk04: Hi, Kevin. Good morning. Good morning, everyone. How are you? Good. Good. Hey, I wanted to start off by asking about, you know, obviously some continued challenges in international markets. And you had, I think, referred last quarter as well to taking a fresh look at you know, just the cost base in some of those markets given the slower than expected recovery. I'm just trying to get a sense as to whether you've started to implement measures or you're still just taking a look and figuring out what the steps are. Just how far along are you in that process?
spk02: Yeah, thanks, Kevin. Great question. Look, we are extremely excited about the growth that we've had, but obviously that excitement is dampened by the margin challenges that we've had in the international markets. And Europe is only one part of that story. However, we have started to make some changes and realign our cost structure to the new market realities. The diversification that we're starting to do in Europe is a step in that direction. We've started to increase our penetration and loss-adjusting space by onboarding some more teams, TPA clients outside of just travel and hospitality, and we're starting to see some success there. But it is a slower journey. I expect to see real results coming really after Q2 where you'll be able to see them flow through in the P&L.
spk04: Efforts to diversify, you referenced Boss Boone. Is the diversification partly organic? You mentioned adding clients in different areas outside of travel.
spk05: Yes, it is both.
spk02: But as you know, we are extremely disciplined about the acquisitions that we make. We need to make sure that The structure of the acquisition is right. The return profile of the acquisition is right. So I think it will be a balanced approach between organic and inorganic ways to diversify the business.
spk04: Okay, that's helpful. And, you know, this is starting to hopefully move into the rearview mirror here, but, you know, obviously the fourth quarter we saw a spike in COVID cases driven by Omicron and you know, even in the early 2022, do you think there was any noticeable impact on your business, either from your ability to access labor or, you know, impact on revenue or anything that measurable that you might have seen there?
spk02: Yeah, as long as economic activity doesn't slow down, we don't get impacted by COVID from a labor pool perspective.
spk05: We did see a little bit of labor issues where COVID was high and the safety measures were not prescribed by the government.
spk02: But I would say that short of actual lockdowns happening where economic activity comes to a stop, I don't see that to be a big issue.
spk04: Okay, good. Just following up again on international, some specific international markets, specifically in the press release you mentioned increased competition for talent in Asia, and you mentioned how you're ramping up your hiring efforts there. And then you also mentioned pressure in one of your UK businesses. I don't know if you could expand on those areas internationally and any others if they're worth highlighting.
spk02: Yeah, let me see if I can talk a little bit about Asia first. So if you look at our Asian operation, it was really an operation that was built by stringing together a bunch of entrepreneurial operations, right? So the So it wasn't sort of operating as a formal enterprise. It has been in the past. It was important for us to start to build much more of an enterprise focused on. But as you build, you always bring about some changes. You bring about an entrepreneurial approach that may have been used before. So it's bound to cause some consternation. And I think that's what we're sort of going through and making sure that we're putting on the right people in the organization that we want.
spk05: extremely well for us, but in the short term, we've seen some issues with it which relate to labor shortages, lead times on construction projects, which have resulted in some profitability challenges in that business.
spk02: We believe that those challenges are largely behind us, but we're still working through that. And, again, it might take a quarter or two to work through the tail of those challenges. Bruce, I don't know if you want to add to that.
spk00: No, I think that's right. We see it largely as transitory issues.
spk04: Okay, great. And then you mentioned how you're – you know, you talked about some of the areas there, like the major and complex, hiring specialist adjusters. You know, it looks like the direct compensation expenses,
spk02: just being people-based or what other that you expect to drive yeah so true to our strategy we have three strategic pillars and our investments are very much aligned in those in the area of large and complex losses we have been investing
spk05: quite a lot in people. I think we mentioned that we've hired 82 adjusters. Our target is to hire 200 adjusters in technology, which is a major part of our strategy.
spk02: We've already initiated it. It'll also give us flexibility and scale. which usually requires a higher upfront investment and the results start to come through over a period of time.
spk05: We continue to innovate, which we believe is resonating with our customers. We've already talked about Asservio in the past.
spk02: We've talked about some other investments in data and analytics. particularly in our broad spire space, which are really creating the differentiation that we need and is evident in the 100% tend to be front-end loaded, and that's what we're seeing in our business as well. Look, I think we've talked a lot about growth for almost a decade. If we talked about growth, we would immediately shift our focus to just pure margin and start to take expense decisions We're more short-term results-oriented than a long-term result-oriented. I think we are squarely focused on growth right now.
spk05: We are absolutely expense-aware.
spk02: We're absolutely going to be prudent in our expense management, but we're not going to take our focus away from growth.
spk04: I understand. In terms of being able to drive that you're looking for and, you know, Can you talk about, you know, obviously the quarter had some really nice growth on the top line. Can you talk about your market share gains you're seeing specifically in the U.S.? You know, you mentioned within the U.S. cat business, just, you know, maybe progression of market share gains and penetration.
spk02: In the U.S., I still don't think that we, or anybody for that matter, truly has a meaningful share of the market. I think it's a highly fragmented market, and we continue to be a participant in that highly fragmented market. So I believe there is a tremendous amount of headroom that exists. We believe, again, that our strategy of quality expertise and digital is the right strategy to create the necessary differentiation. We've got a great brand recognition. but I think we need to work on our brand awareness. And what I mean by that is people understand who Crawford is, but they don't understand exactly all of the things that we do. And that's been a major focus area for us. And as we've done that, we've seen our share of wallet grow with the large carriers where there's an opportunity for us to grow our share of wallet. But we believe there is still a huge opportunity with mid-sized carriers as well. We've been making quite a lot of investments in the sales infrastructure, which we've talked about over the last couple of years.
spk05: And I'm pleased to see that that investment is starting to show the results in the U.S.
spk02: So we believe that there is continued momentum in the U.S. Our challenge always is that the results are often dependent on the weather. So we will – but if we look at on a pure client basis, our market share is continuing to grow.
spk04: All right, great. And you did touch there on more of the small and mid-sized carrier market in the U.S. and the investments you're making there. I guess, can you just again talk about maybe some – I think you're very early on in that opportunity, but it seems like that could be a fairly significant opportunity over the longer term.
spk02: It is. We truly believe it's a fairly significant opportunity, but it does require, as you can imagine, you know, one top five carrier win is equal to sometimes 10 or 12 midsize carrier wins, right? So it just takes a little bit longer for those wins to start to show, but those wins tend to be stickier. They tend to have more repeatable business. And we are seeing success there. Another place that we're seeing success is what I call early-stage companies, which are starting out and don't have the claims infrastructure. We've seen success there. The statement that we're seeing growth across all our segments in the U.S., I think we will continue to see this growth if we stay true to our strategy, which we plan to be.
spk04: a couple more here.
spk05: This is more just numbers or a question around it.
spk04: I'm trying to just recall in terms of unallocated corporate costs, you know, if there's some reasonality associated with the fourth quarter where they kind of spike up sequentially, I know that's happened in the last couple of years, or if there's you know, true-ups or something going on there. I just can't kind of recall what the sequential progression is on that line.
spk00: Kevin, this is Bruce. There really shouldn't be seasonality per se in those costs, although you are right, the last couple of years we've seen higher than normal amounts hit in the fourth quarter. On a quarterly basis, you know, we go through true-ups of, bad debt provision, self-insured reserves, and the like. And those items, be them credits or debits, will show up in corporate unallocated. So you'll see a little bit of volatility. And we saw a little bit higher number this year than we were anticipating. But as far as seasonality, you really shouldn't expect the fourth quarter to spike.
spk04: The health of the overall new business pipeline across your segments and what you're seeing there, did you see any slowdown related to Omicron or as you would hope?
spk02: The new business pipeline continues to build. We haven't seen in the U.S. slowdown in Omicron. I must admit we saw slowdown because of the Omicron in Europe and in U.K. to some extent. But we haven't really seen a slowdown from a pipeline perspective just because of Omicron. So we feel good about, we continue to feel good about the pipeline that we have.
spk04: Okay, great. Thanks for taking all the questions.
spk02: Thanks, Kevin.
spk04: Appreciate it.
spk03: And at this time, there are no further questions. I would like to turn the call back over to Mr. Verma for closing remarks.
spk02: Thank you, Phyllis. In 2021, we made tremendous strides in advancing our purpose of restoring lives, businesses, and communities. Our long-term strategy enables our growth plans and envisioned future as we continue to deliver innovative and market-leading solutions. Above all else, we remain deeply committed to protecting the health and safety of our employees while continuing to provide best-in-class service to our clients despite the current global environment. And in that spirit, I want to thank our colleagues in Australia and UK who, under the leadership of Lisa Bartlett and Tim Jarman, are doing a spectacular job under very difficult conditions to deliver on our purpose post the storms and floods there. As we embark on 2022 and beyond, we are committed to moving forward from a position of strength as we find new ways to excel for our clients while also delivering further value to our shareholders. Our fourth quarter and full year 2021 growth trajectory is not only indicative of Crawford's strength and resilience through 2021, but also evidence of our incredible momentum moving forward. We look forward to having you join us on the journey ahead, and thank you for your support. Thank you and God bless.
spk03: Thank you for participating in today's Crawford and Company conference call. This call will be available for replay beginning at 11.30 a.m. Eastern Standard Time today through 11.59 p.m. Eastern Standard Time on April 15, 2022. The conference ID number for the replay is 428-5212. The number to dial for the replay is 800-585-8367 or 416-621-4642. Thank you. You may now disconnect.
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